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They’re starting my bid at less than I paid for my first year of college in New York? Absurdly, I’m insulted.
I stand very still. There's a sensation that comes when you hear a number attached to your body, a cross between vertigo and cold fury. I've learned over the last weeks that if I let it move through me fully, I'll do something stupid. I let it wash off me—soothing myself with the reminder of what I’ll do when I’m the one in power, and it will happen.
He spins me back around, and my eyes immediately find the green ones again, even as he terrifies me.
“Three hundred,” Green Eyes says. The room goes dead quiet.
The auctioneer’s smile flickers, recalibrates, then brightens. “Three hundred thousand. Do I hear—”
Someone else lifts a bid card.
“Four hundred,” the man says before the auctioneer even responds to the second bid.
Someone else lifts a card.
“Five hundred.” He’s just bid half a million for me. I can’t decide whether no one contests his bid because they don’t want me or because they don’t want to cross this man. Maybe both.
“Going once.” I can’t breathe. I’m staring at Green Eyes, wondering what he’s got planned for me and why he looks like he hates me. “Twice.”
I swallow hard when I finally see an orange Exit sign in the back corner. Hope rises in my chest.
Exit.
“Sold. Lot forty to the man in the back. Pay the cashier, and we will secure your goods.”
The man doesn’t smile, doesn’t even look satisfied. He just stands and starts walking toward the cashier as I’m pushed forward to someone waiting for me. The next woman is dragged up behind me and thrust into the spotlight.
“Stand here,” someone says.
Why do I feel dizzy? I don’t move. I decided in the last ten seconds that I’m not walking to him. He bought the right to take me, but he didn’t buy my legs working for free.
Green Eyes stops at the bottom of the steps and looks up at me. This close, I can see that, yes, his eyes are green and fathomless, but flat in a way that’s terrifying, like staring into an abyss. No triumph. No hunger. Something emptier and more dangerous than either.
Around us, the auction continues, cold and ruthless. One of the women on stage screams, and another sobs quietly. Two of the men bringing them up get into a fight, quickly broken up by security. But somehow, everything else falls away, and there’s just me and the man who bought me.
When I don’t move, he crooks a finger at me to come to him.
I stare and don’t react, as if he hasn’t moved at all. “You can walk down,” he says in a low voice only I can hear. “Or I’ll carry you. Your choice. The last one you’ll have for a while.”
His accent’s hard to pin.
I stare at him and don’t move.
Wordlessly, he steps toward me, bends, and picks me up. His touch isn’t like Shamrock’s or Ginger’s. He’s somehow more careful, like he’s handling something he doesn’t want to break and doesn’t care to explain why.
An older man near the stage gives me a lewd once-over that makes my skin crawl. As we pass, he reaches out a hand as if to touch me, his fingers almost touching mine, like I’m cloth he wants to feel before he purchases me.
Green Eyes moves before the man's hand reaches halfway to me. One arm locks me back, the other catches his wrist and bends it. Not far. He doesn't need to.
The crack is wet and sharp, and the man's scream goes up an octave before it cuts off into something worse, a high, thin sound through his teeth. He folds at the knees, like something's been cut loose. One hand cradles the wrist, rocking, his face the color of old ash.
No one in the room responds. The auctioneer continues, and so does the music.
“No one fucking touches her.” Green Eyes lifts his head, his voice carrying to anyone else who even thinks about it.
Oh god. He just broke a man’s wrist without even breaking a sweat, all while still holding me. What else is he capable of?
Then his hand returns to secure me, and we walk faster.
